How to track your fitness with Evernote

How to track your fitness with Evernote

Evernote is a very versatile tool and can be purposed to do many things. We have written about why you need Evernote to win before. That is a great read if you are not familiar with Evernote before.

This article will cover how you can track your fitness with a free and easy tool that is available on all platforms. Lets start with the WHY?

“All people who are serious about their training write down their workouts” – Mark Rippetoe (Starting Strength 3rd ed)

Why should you track your fitness?

You want to improve your fitness.. Right? How can you possibly know if you have improved if you are not tracking your workouts or in some way measuring your progress? You do want progress… Right?

“what gets measured gets improved”.

We are not saying that you should try to set PR every single workout, and you should not compare yourself to others (unless you want to of course). But over a long period of time (lets say five years, or even one year) your fitness curve should go up. And you should get closer towards your specific goals. If you have no goals and are not tracking you can still be fit and be healthy but there is no way for you to know this and “prove it” to yourself. Remember a track can also be a confidence boost showing you how consistent you really are, even if you are unsuccessful in making progress.

“Tracking exercise progress helps to keep us “aware” of where we are against our goals at any given point in the process. As our fitness levels increase, we often need to change up our exercise activity to ensure we are challenging ourselves and also keeping things fun and exciting! In addition, having a written record (it doesn’t have to be fancy…just a simple notebook), helps us clearly see progress we are making so we can celebrate. This helps boost our confidence and place our focus on our progress vs. how far we may feel from our ultimate goals. I always encourage logging and tracking nutrition and exercise especially for those just starting to implement new healthy lifestyle patterns in this area.”

How to track your fitness with Evernote?

1. Create a notebook

First you should create a notebook for your workouts – I call mine “Training log” and it is located in my notebook stack called “3-logs”. You can also consider following Grant tip and call it a Workout Log – whatever you prefer.

Enter your workouts right after (or even before) you conduct them.

My preffered style is

WU (WarmUp)

2k row

200 du

Actual exercise

Diane

100 TTB

Cooldown/Mobility

10 min mobility

Review

Diane PR, good on energy,

And/Or snap a picture of your workouts

A great thing with Evernote is that it also has text-recognition so if you search for it later it will find the text inside your images.

And/Or use voice notes

Evernote has a built in voice recording feature so you can remind yourself to not do that workout again. 🙂

2. Tag your workouts.

Once you have your Workouts in Evernote it is time to tag them. My favorite tags are: PR, CrossFit (to separate from GYM, Swim, Run and other activities like climbing and so onn), HSPU, Benchmark (WOD) and then adding tags like FRAN, DIANE since those are the ones

Tip from the Coach: Keep tags to a minimum – Make it easy for yourself – do not overuse tags – use tops 15 tags for CrossFit to begin with and DO NOT add tags that you think is “cool” today – like ûbersnatchPR or something because you will not remember it and it will just clutter Evernote.

3 Create a library of workouts for reference

TO have a library with workouts saves time and you can simply reference them instead of having to re-enter, typically for us CrossFitters: FRAN, DIANE, GRACE, FGB and so on. Example of FRAN in my workout library.

Then you can simply reference your workout log by linking them in Evernote. If you are a coach this will save you some time as well.

4 Create “Saved Searches” to access information quickly.

Evernote allows you to save searches for quick access. Here are two of my favorites:

notebook:”Training Log” created:week-1″ Ill get a list of all my training sessions last week or

notebook:”Training Log” tag:fran tag:”Benchmark (WOD)” – I get a list of ALL my fran workouts.

Coach? Even more benefits.

Use templates for new clients

You can use an onboarding template for your new customers and then share a specific notebook with them as they progress.

Sharing and collaborating with clients:

“Since I’m able to share notes with clients, we can collaborate and I can provide feedback that they can access from any device, wherever they are (at the gym or at a restaurant). Clients share their progress log with me once a week.”

LIFT

Evernote in combination with LIFT is a coaching combo. More about LIFT In an upcoming article, in the meantime feel free to connect with me on Lift

I hope this helps in your fitness tracking endeavors!!? Let us know that you appreciated this post by sending us an email or

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Peter is Podcaster, CrossFit Coach, Security Professional and productivity expert. He is the founder of FLAWD.se and the author of Security Encyclopedia: SakerhetsBibeln.se. Peter blogs about health, technology and productivity. Peter is on a mission to help you to Focus, implement success disciplines and to Win in life!

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Host of the FLAWD Podcast. Security Professional. Coach in Productivity/Mobility/Running/CrossFit. CyberCoach
Peter works for an international security company. Founder of FLAWD and author of Security Encyclopedia: SakerhetsBibeln.se. Peter blogs about technology, productivity and health.
Mission: Continuous relentless improvement. And helping as many people and organizations as possible -> to win.. long term.